/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18775301]

1.1 Background

Since its development around 12,000 years ago, agriculture, the very basis of civilization, has undergone many radical changes, but arguably the most notable of these was the ‘Green Revolution’ of the mid-20th century. During and preceding this period, the world’s most populous countries were on the brink of or experiencing outright famine. India relied on unprecedented levels of food aid from the United States and other developed countries to avoid mass starvation, while China’s tragic Great Famine took the lives of some 30 million people. Throughout the 1960s, many academics predicted an imminent human die-off due to overpopulation. Miraculously, this was avoided. The Green Revolution that saved countless lives involved the engineering and distribution of new, high-yield varieties of staple crops, extraordinary use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, mechanization, monocropping, and a vast expansion of irrigation – a global transition to industrial agriculture. The world marvelled as average cereal yields saw an increase of 175% and the volume of world agricultural production more than tripled. Finally escaping the specter of starvation, Asia’s economic growth exploded, and the global population grew from 3 billion in 1960 to its current figure of nearly 8 billion. It is hard to overstate the importance of the advances in agricultural technology made in the 1950s-1960s to the foundation of the world in which we live today.

Unfortunately, the fertilizers, pesticides, water for irrigation, and energy to power the staggering amount of machinery that the world’s food systems now rely on come from often wildly unsustainable sources, with often wildly detrimental environmental impacts, and scientists and organizations around the world have been warning us of this for years. It won’t be sufficient to just make our current production sustainable – estimates are that food production will need to increase from the current 8.4 billion tons to almost 13.5 billion tons a year to feed the world’s booming population. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations notes that achieving a level of agricultural production to provide for a projected 9.3 billion people by 2050, from an already seriously depleted natural resource base, will be impossible without profound changes in our food and agriculture systems.

[Anonymous No.18775307]

1.2 Fertilizers

All crops require 17 essential elements to fully develop, but of these, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are the most critical – and are the primary ingredients of synthetic chemical fertilizers. For the millenia prior to the development of modern fertilizers, farmers used manure and crop rotation to naturally cycle these key nutrients back into the soil – but by the 19th century, as urbanization and industrialization accelerated, rapid population growth was threatening the Western world’s food security, and the traditional methods were quickly becoming insufficient. To increase crop yields, farmers began to turn to guano (accumulated bat and bird feces), which is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and a massive global industry developed. By 1840, millions of tons of guano were being exported from Latin America and spread across the fields of Europe and the United States, and by 1856, the U.S. was so reliant on guano that it began a campaign of island conquest to secure supplies of the resource. The era culminated in the War of the Pacific from 1879-1884, during which Chile invaded Bolivia to annex its guano-rich coastline, and after which Chile’s economy boomed as it extracted the most important source of fertilizer in the world. (Bolivia remains a landlocked country).

Unfortunately for Chile, by the turn of the 20th century guano deposits were dwindling, and the world began an urgent search for new sources of plant nutrition.

1.2.1 Nitrogen

Unlike phosphorus and potassium, nitrogen is relatively hard to find in mineral forms, and so modern nitrogen fertilizers are synthesized through the Haber-Bosch process developed in the early 20th century.

[Anonymous No.18775316]

>>18775307

The process begins with a source of hydrogen gas and atmospheric nitrogen that are reacted to form ammonia. The most-used source of hydrogen is natural gas (methane). Other sources of hydrogen, such as coal, are used in some regions. After hydrogen and N are combined under conditions of high temperature and pressure to form ammonia,Approximately half the food produced now in the world is supported by the use of N fertilizer. Another way to look at this is that inside your body’s every cell, protein or DNA molecule, half of the N, on average, is a product of the Haber-Bosch process from a N fertilizer factory.

Because the production of hydrogen gas required for the synthesis of ammonia largely comes from natural gas, the price of this primary feedstock is the major factor in the cost of ammonia production. Ammonia factories sometimes close or open in various parts of the world in response to fluctuating gas prices. Higher energy costs always translate into higher prices for all N fertilizers. There are a number of organic sources of N that are commonly used to fertilize crops. But remember that much of the N in animal manure, composts and biosolids come from crops that received applications of fertilizer N. Therefore, the N in many organic fertilizers originated as inorganic N fertilizer.

[Anonymous No.18775327]

What is this OC jesus christ

[Anonymous No.18775529]

>>18775301
green revolution into enormous population overshoot is kino

[Anonymous No.18775541]

It's a serious problem, and I don't see a solution. It might be callous to say, but a lot of people are going to die of famine as resource scarcity becomes more pronounced.

[Anonymous No.18776397]

>>18775301
>agriculture, the very basis of civilization,
Retroactively refuted by Gobekli Tepe.

[Anonymous No.18776424]

>>18776397
>Gobekli Tepe
Very interesting, I hadn't heard of that before. But in regards to the OP large-scale agriculture is the basis of at least our current civilization

[Anonymous No.18776440]

>>18775301
introduction of a human gene to produce the FTO enzyme in potatoes and rice has, by itself, increased yields in those crops by 50% in just the past few months. Humanity is down but not out.
>Their report in the journal Nature Biotechnology says the modified plants grew significantly larger, produced longer root systems, and were better able to tolerate drought stress. In humans, the FTO enzyme erases certain markers that regulate the production of proteins associated with cellular growth. In plants, the FTO enzyme similarly erases markers that inhibit their growth.

[Anonymous No.18776485]

>>18776424
It can't work both ways. Gobekli Tepe is the most significant discovery in archeological history because it is definitive proof that material conditions are not the most important factor when it comes to human civilization and that humans are a lot smarter than academia thinks. Hunter gatherers were able to build this massive structure without the ability to cultivate food on sight, displaying an already very complex social structure before the development of agriculture.

https://youtu.be/SnRM0d2NFkk?t=1171
This guy talks about how the full impact of the discovery of Gobekli Tepe has not even reached mainstream thought. Mostly because archeologists don't like that their century old theory about the history of civilization has been shown to be false by one problematic discovery. But to me, if there is any kind of a problem like this, the problem lies in your method, not in what you are studying.

I think Gobekli Tepe shows us that you can't ascribe one single factor to be the basis of civilization. This demands a complete rethink of how we conceive of what civilization even is. It proves that every part of a civilization has contemporaneous influence i.e. its art and religion is just as much its foundation as its material culture.

[Anonymous No.18776491]

>>18776485
are there books about this? I am very interested in economics, economic history etc. so what you are saying floored me.

[Anonymous No.18776536]

>>18776491
I haven't read anything on it. Just been listening to lectures about it.

[Anonymous No.18776541]

>>18776485
I will check that out but in the end what I'm saying is that at this point in time we can't have civilization as we know it, and feed 8 billion people, without agriculture, regardless of whether or not we could have begun without agriculture -- largely due to sheer population size, but also we have forgotten how to hunt and gather, as well as destroyed huge chunks of Earth's natural resources.

[Anonymous No.18776567]

What is the point of presenting the information in such a ridiculous format? Just go chronological. Also kind of scattershot regarding guano collection. US was no where near as dependent as Europe, US had plenty of land and farms could be moved to more fertile land if need be, guano was cheaper and simpler and they still had a great many local and nearby sources. Europe on the other hand could not just move their crops, they were running out of viable crop land and had used up all their local guano. Island conquest is bullshit, we are talking about small rock islands in the middle of nowhere which are visited only by birds, there was no need for conquest. The US was just harvesting guano from the islands nearby, as many countries had been doing for quite some time, the European nations were fighting minor wars over such islands.

[Anonymous No.18776613]

>>18776567
Forgot to mention that your bit about crop rotation is a tad off. Resting the fields was the key part, population boom meant they could no longer rest the fields, they still rotated crops. Crop rotation died out later with the Haber process. Probably better to actually explain crop rotation instead of the nutrients plants need.